Home › The Principles of Cookery › WHORTLEBERRY JAM (a German recipe)
WHORTLEBERRY JAM (a German recipe)
Moisten the sugar with wine, and boil it well. To four quarts of fruit allow four pounds of sugar and half an ounce of powdered cinnamon. When the sugar boils in transparent bubbles, throw in the fruit, and keep stirring till it is of a smooth consistency and no more thin juice collects on the top. Sprinkle in the cinnamon just before the jam is done.
A short German-style jam that leans on a wine syrup rather than water, and gives no quantity for the wine — the one figure you have to supply yourself.
- The unstated wineNo amount is given. Enough to wet 4 lb of sugar is roughly 1 cup; more will simply extend the boiling. A light red or a dry white both work, and most of the alcohol boils off during the long boil, though a trace will remain.
- Four quarts of fruitBerries were sold by volume, not weight. Four quarts of whortleberries is about 5 lb, so this is a jam with slightly less sugar than fruit — looser and more tart than a modern equal-weight preserve.
- What whortleberries areThe European bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus — smaller, darker-fleshed and sharper than a cultivated blueberry. Blueberries substitute directly; wild huckleberries are closer in flavour.
- "Transparent bubbles"This is the older way of reading a sugar syrup by eye: the bubbles turn glassy and small as the water boils off. The book gives no temperature, and "transparent bubbles" is not one of the standard named sugar stages, so any thermometer figure is an interpretation rather than the recipe's own instruction; the fruit goes in at that point.
- Setting the jamBilberries and blueberries are low in pectin and low in acid, so "no more thin juice collects on the top" can take 20-30 minutes of stirring. The juice of a lemon or two shortens it considerably and sharpens the flavour.
- Cinnamon lastHalf an ounce is closer to five or six teaspoons, near two tablespoons — a firm hand by current taste. Added at the end, as directed, it stays aromatic; boiled through it turns dusty and slightly bitter.
- Stir constantlyA sugar-heavy fruit mass scorches on the bottom without warning and the burnt note carries through the whole batch. Use the widest heavy pan you have and a flat-edged spoon that reaches the corners.
- Yield and keepingFour pounds of sugar with some five pounds of fruit makes a large batch — on the order of ten to a dozen half-pint jars. The recipe says nothing about sealing, as period jams were often covered with paper and kept cold; refrigerate what you open and follow current water-bath processing directions for anything meant for the shelf.
"Whortleberry" is one of a tangle of English regional names — hurtleberry, hurts, blaeberry, bilberry — for the small wild Vaccinium of heaths and upland woods, gathered rather than grown because the plant resists cultivation. Cassell's flags this as a German recipe, and the markers are there: the syrup started with wine instead of water, and the heavy dose of cinnamon, both habits of Central European fruit cookery, where bilberries (Blaubeeren, Heidelbeeren) fill pancakes, dumplings and tarts. Boiling the sugar to the right degree before the fruit goes in is the older technique for preserving colour and shape: the berries spend as little time over heat as possible, so the jam keeps some fruit texture instead of collapsing into purée. That whole judgment rested on the cook's eye until domestic thermometers became common late in the nineteenth century, which is why the instruction is phrased as a description of the bubbles rather than a number.